Author : Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 32,37 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0819568899
A major critical work from one of the preeminent voices of science fiction scholarship
Author : Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 17,8 MB
Release : 2012-10-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0819571520
This major critical work from one of the preeminent voices in science fiction scholarship reframes the genre as a way of understanding today’s world. As the application of technoscience increasingly transforms every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. Though the broad scope of science fiction may vary in artistic quality and sophistication, it shares a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. A strikingly high proportion of today’s films, commercial art, popular music, video games, and non-genre fiction are what Csicsery-Ronay calls “science fictional” —stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the “seven beauties” of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technoscience’s development into a global regime.
Author : Roger Luckhurst
Publisher : Polity
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 10,55 MB
Release : 2005-05-06
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0745628931
In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history, and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre. Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. His astute analysis examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This highly readable study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book.
Author : Arthur B. Evans
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 787 pages
File Size : 30,75 MB
Release : 2010-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0819569550
The best single-volume anthology of science fiction available—includes online teacher's guide The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction features over a 150 years' worth of the best science fiction ever collected in a single volume. The fifty-two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher's guide at http://sfanthology.site.wesleyan.edu/ accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting. The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world's most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.
Author : Sherryl Vint
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 19,66 MB
Release : 2021-10-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1108839002
A theorization of how the bioeconomy and biotechnology remake 'life itself,' creating crises in ethics and governance.
Author : Franco Moretti
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 21,20 MB
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1789603315
In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres-the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel-as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.
Author : Lars Schmeink
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 43,99 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1781383766
'Biopunk Dystopias' contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet.
Author : Andrea L. Bell
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 33,47 MB
Release : 2003-07-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780819566348
The first-ever collection of Latin American science fiction in English.
Author : Trace Reddell
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 649 pages
File Size : 22,87 MB
Release : 2018-10-16
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1452957363
A groundbreaking approach to sound in sci-fi films offers new ways of construing both sonic innovation and science fiction cinema Including original readings of classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, The Sound of Things to Come delivers a comprehensive history of sound in science fiction cinema. Approaching movies as sound objects that combine cinematic apparatus and consciousness, Trace Reddell presents a new theory of sonic innovation in the science fiction film. Reddell assembles a staggering array of movies from sixty years of film history—including classics, blockbusters, B-movies, and documentaries from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—all in service to his powerful conception of sound making as a speculative activity in its own right. Reddell recasts debates about noise and music, while arguing that sound in the science fiction film provides a medium for alien, unknown, and posthuman sound objects that transform what and how we hear. Avoiding genre criticism’s tendency to obsess over utopias, The Sound of Things to Come draws on film theory, sound studies, and philosophies of technology to advance conversations about the avant-garde, while also opening up opportunities to examine cinematic sounds beyond the screen.
Author : Anindita Banerjee
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 36,34 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0819573345
How science fiction forged a unique Russian vision of modernity distinct from Western models
